Dark Web: How The Unseen Internet Is Accessed

In 2015, the founder of a website called the Silk Road was sentenced to life in prison. The billion-dollar black market site was once the premiere online bazaar for drugs and other contraband, but it remained hidden from casual internet users for years because of something called the dark web. Here’s how that dark side of the internet actually works. Anatomy of the internet If you think of the web like an iceberg, you have the surface web up top. It’s the internet you see and use every day and consists of all the websites indexed by traditional search engines like Google. It’s where you shop on Amazon and listen to music on Spotify. What’s submerged is the deep web — an anonymous online space only accessible with specific software. Then there’s the dark web, which is the part of the deep web that hides your identity and location. It’s basically just “a series of encrypted networks that serve to anonymize peoples’ use on the internet,” said Matthew Swensen, a Special Agent for the